Metaphor and the slave trade in West African literature / Laura Murphy.

Against amnesia: metaphors and memory in West Africa -- Magical capture in a landscape of terror: the trope of the body in the bag in Amos Tutuola's My life in the bush of ghosts -- Geographies of memory: mapping slavery's recurrence in Ben Okri's The famished road -- The curse of constant remembrance: the belated trauma of the slave trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments -- Childless mothers and dead husbands: the enslavement of intimacy and Ama Ata Aidoo's secret language of memory -- The suffering of survival -- The future of the past: the new historical fiction.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation. Laura T. Murphy's insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise margina.

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